Plastic straws, utensils and stirrers banned from restaurants.
Working for Specialty Produce of San Juan Bautista, Alex Mendoza bags sweet peas for a customer as the Downtown San Jose Farmers’ Market opens for its 25th season Friday, May 5, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. (Jim Gensheimer/Bay Area News Group)
Although Palo Alto adopted one of the strictest plastic bans in the Bay Area Monday night, some residents and city leaders contend that the measure doesn’t go far enough.
Palo Alto City Council unanimously voted Monday night to prohibit the distribution of plastic straws, utensils and stirrers in all food service establishments starting in January as well as ban produce and meat bags in grocery stores and farmers markets starting in July 2020.
The proposed bans are part of a larger city effort — called its Zero Waste Plan — to divert 95 percent of its waste from landfills and reduce 80 percent of its greenhouse gases by 2030.
The plan calls for phasing in the ban, which many residents, environmentalists and at least one city council member strongly opposed.
The bans passed Monday night represent phase one of the Zero Waste Plan.
Phase two, which the city plans to put into effect in 2021, would require all food service establishments to charge for non-reusable cups and containers, provide reusable foodware items to all dine-in customers and install dishwashers. The last phase, planned for 2025, would require food service establishments to provide reusable foodware for all takeout orders.
Councilwoman Alison Cormack asked the council Monday to consider adding the phase two requirement that food establishments charge for nonreusable cups and containers to the initial ordinance.
City staff, however, informed her that developing a system for those charges would be too difficult to put in place within six months — when the ordinance goes into effect.
After hearing the staff input, Cormack withdrew her request but said that she was “not happy about it.”
In a Capitol Hill hearing, Christie Whitman and others urged Congress to provide stronger oversight of the Trump EPA and raised concerns about the agency’s ties to industries it regulates.
Lee M. Thomas, EPA administrator in 1985-1989 under President Ronald Reagan, described some of his concerns about the Trump EPA during a congressional hearing, saying, “I believe there is a need for rigorous oversight by the committee of the agency’s capacity for sound decisions.”
Three former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrators who served under Republican presidents urged Congress to ramp up its oversight of the Trump EPA on Tuesday, expressing distress at the agency’s attempts to mislead the public on the risks of climate change and brush aside science in decision-making.
They were joined by Democrat Gina McCarthy, the agency’s chief under President Barack Obama, illustrating that these are bipartisan sentiments.
“I find it disconcerting,” McCarthy told a congressional hearing, that “this collection of past EPA Administrators feel obligated to testify together and individually to make the case that what is happening at EPA today is, simply put, not normal, and to solicit your help to get it on a more productive path.”
Lee M. Thomas, who served under President Ronald Reagan as EPA administrator from 1985 to 1989 before becoming a business executive, questioned whether EPA is fulfilling its mission.
“Does the Agency have adequate resources with the strong scientific capability it needs? Is it seeking input form key scientific advisory committees? Is it coordinating actively with the broad scientific community on research surrounding environmental issues? I don’t think they do,” he wrote in his testimony for the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
All of the former administrators stressed that the current EPA needs clear direction from Congress and a return to the bipartisan support and adherence to science that bolstered the agency in the past, when major environmental legislation would pass with overwhelming margins.
Each had been involved in regulations that President Donald Trump’s administration is now trying to dismantle.
William K. Reilly, EPA administrator in the George H.W. Bush administration, named climate change as one of the “serious challenges in protecting public health and natural resources” that the nation faces.
William K. Reilly was administrator under George H.W. Bush when the Clean Air Act was reauthorized and rules for ozone-depleting chemicals and toxic emissions were added. The Clean Air Act has been a frequent target of Trump administration attempts to roll back pollution regulations.
“Our country continues to face serious challenges in protecting public health and natural resources,” Reilly said, naming climate change and building community resiliency to address the impacts of extreme weather events, coastal erosion and sea level rise, among other challenges. He has criticized Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.
“These challenges require an EPA that is strong, credible, and sufficiently resourced to conduct and sponsor timely research and risk assessments,” he said.
Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, also talked about her growing concerns about the impact of climate change, particularly on the ocean that borders her home state of New Jersey, and about the risks to human health from pollution.
Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator in the George W. Bush administration, had harsh words for the behavior she sees in the EPA’s leadership today. She said the Trump administration is “using ideology to drive environmental policy instead of letting science drive policy.”
Whitman listed several “egregious actions” by the Trump EPA, including its plans to roll back vehicle emissions standards, repeal methane emissions from oil and gas operations, and relax regulations on toxic air pollution.
At the same time, she noted, it has been replacing scientists on its Science Advisory Board with industry representatives and trying to formally restrict the scientific evidence EPA can use in policy making.
The Trump administration is “using ideology to drive environmental policy instead of letting science drive policy,” Whitman said.
Newswise — New findings of a multi-university research team show the pesticide DDT persists in remote lakes at concerning levels half a century after it was banned, affecting key aquatic species and potentially entire lake food webs.
“What was considered yesterday’s environmental crisis in the 1950s through 1970s remains today’s problem,” says lead author Dr. Josh Kurek, Assistant Professor in Geography and Environment at Mount Allison University. “Decades of intense insecticide applications to our conifer forests have left a lasting mark on these lakes—and likely many others in eastern North America.”
Between 1950 and 1970 prior to legal restrictions, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) insecticides were widely applied to eastern North American forests to manage naturally occurring insect outbreaks, such as spruce budworm. Although often applied to forests by airplane, chemicals like DDT are highly persistent and can eventually wash into lakes from their surrounding landscape. This study looked at dated sediments from the bottom of five remote lakes located within different watersheds in north-central New Brunswick, Canada. Lake sediments provide a well-recognized and powerful archive of environmental conditions, which allows researchers to assess chemical and biological conditions in lakes before, during, and after pesticide use.
The study was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, highlights the chemical legacy of one of North America’s largest aerial spray programs of insecticides ever coordinated by forest stakeholders.
SEPTA’s new electric buses are being tested on routes in South Philadelphia and Center City
Jason Laughlin reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer Updated: June 10, 2019
SEPTA’s 22 electric, emissions-free buses are on the street, but it remains to be seen whether they’re a first step toward greener public transit or a novelty that will prove unsustainable.
The authority’s $23.8 million investment in 25 electric buses — three more will be put in service soon — from the manufacturer, Proterra represents the biggest commitment yet to the technology by an East Coast transit agency. They stand out from the rest of SEPTA’s buses, with big front and rear windows, and a Peco advertisement wrapped around them.
The new buses, though, compose a small percentage of the transit agency’s almost 1,500-bus fleet, and SEPTA won’t commit to going fully electric. Electric buses used elsewhere have proved less reliable than their emissions-spewing predecessors, and it is unclear whether the buses’ cost and SEPTA’s battery charging capacity will prevent them from being used widely in a big city.
“We don’t know how they perform in our conditions,” said Erik Johanson, SEPTA’s director of innovation. “We need to go through all four seasons to see how these buses are able to perform.”
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins announced late Tuesday that their two houses have agreed on reforms to the rules covering nearly 1 million apartments citywide.
The accord came just in time to “age” and be voted upon before the rent laws expire on June 15. It would limit or eliminate many of the mechanisms that allow landlords to increase lease rates on the price-controlled units, but falls well short of some of the measures favored by tenant activists.
The package would, however, end the drama that recurs every few years because, for the first time in decades, it was given no expiration date.
“These reforms give New Yorkers the strongest tenant protections in history,” the two Democrats said in a joint statement. “These reforms will pass both legislative houses and we are hopeful that the governor will sign them into law. It is the right thing to do.”
The legislation would end high-rent/high-income, often inaccurately referred to as “vacancy decontrol,” in which a vacant apartment escapes the state’s regulatory reach once its rent exceeds $2,774.76 per month—or if the rent passes that threshold and a landlord can show the income of its occupants exceeded $200,000 two years in a row. It also would abolish the vacancy and longevity “bonuses” which permit landlords to dramatically increase rents after tenants move out.
The bill would lock in “preferential rents,” that is, rents that are less than the maximum allowed, as the baseline for future percentage increases set by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. However, when a tenant with a preferential rent moves out, the landlord can raise the rent to the maximum regulated figure.
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the rent-law debate has concerned major capital improvements and individual apartment improvements, which respectively permit landlords to permanently raise tenants’ rents after renovations to entire buildings or particular units. Some progressives hoped to see these mechanisms eradicated, while landlords and their sympathizers insisted they are necessary incentives for repairs and property investment.
Under the Heastie/Stewart-Cousins package, the rent hikes resulting from such projects would expire after 30 years. Further, it would cap increases for major capital improvements in New York City at 2%, down from 6%, and would require stricter state review and oversight of the procedures, which some landlords have exploited. At least 25% of such improvements would have to be audited, and the kind of improvements that may be counted toward rent increases would be further limited.
Also, landlords would only be able to spend $15,000 on an individual apartment improvement in any given 15-year period, and would be limited to three renovations per unit every 15 years.
